Jennifer Fraley has been superintendent of Carter County since 2025, and the district’s school board opted to make her hire permanent in October. Photo provided by Jennifer Fraley
The new superintendent of Carter County, Jennifer Fraley, hopes to continue the collaboration happening in the district between educators, district staff and community members.
She said staff in the district are always willing to go above and beyond without asking, such as helping with the summer feeding program, which Fraley said has turned into an all hands-on-deck activity.
“Our principals come out and help; teachers, administrators, everyone just wants to be a part of it,” Fraley said. “I have a wonderful staff; the community is very welcoming. They want to be a part of things as we are working on our profile of a learner, or as we call it, our durable skills framework. There’s lots of participation from those folks in that work when we have community events. The community wants what’s best for their kids.”
Fraley recently served as director of mathematics education at the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) in 2024, then became interim superintendent of Carter County in 2025. The Carter County Board of Education made the hire permanent in October.
Fraley is starting her 35th year in education, serving in a variety of different roles. She started as a reading and math teacher in Wolfe County, then worked at the Region 8 Service Center in Prestonsburg. She was also a branch manager in the area of secondary education at KDE, the professional learning lead at the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, and chief academic officer at Carter County.
“It probably takes somebody crazy to work 35 years in education and still going,” Fraley said. “But being superintendent is something that I’ve always wanted to do, so when this opportunity presented itself in a place that I love, I really felt like I was called to be here and I’m glad I’m here.”
Fraley grew up in Louisville and graduated from Iroquois High School (Jefferson County), but she said she always knew she wanted to live and work in a rural area. After she graduated from the University of Louisville, she started looking for jobs in rural areas, which led her to Eastern Kentucky.
“I just like the rural area. The people are amazing and the kids are very grateful and it’s easy to build relationships with people here, so it just feels like home,” Fraley said. “(Carter County) has a long history of excellence and I wanted to stay in the Eastern Kentucky area.”
Fraley received a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Louisville, a master’s degree and a Rank 1 in educational leadership from Morehead State University. She has a doctorate degree in education administration from the University of the Cumberlands.
Fraley said she wants the district to focus on several instructional priorities that center around using formative assessment and intentional planning. She wants to focus on strong Tier one instruction in the district’s multi-tiered system of supports framework and well as their durable skills framework.
She said the district worked with America Succeeds, which is a nonprofit dedicated to equipping learners with durable skills for economic mobility, to identify skills that employers want from graduates in their county. They adopted the organization’s Kentucky Durable Skills Framework, which Fraley said focuses on 10 skills that have sub-skills underneath them, such as communication with sub-skills of public speaking and interview skills.
This summer, district staff have been working on increasing ways students can experience those durable skills in elementary and middle school. She said groups of teachers are working to translate their 10 durable skills into what it looks like in each grade level’s content areas.
“We are giving kids some flexibility in those skills aligned to their framework, aligned to their pathway,” Fraley said. “So, students are experiencing those, not just in a classroom, but also in a real-world work experience and making sure that our career tech center uses those skills that they really become recognizable to all of our students and our families.”
Fraley is excited to be part of helping build the district’s new career and technical center building. She said the current building is outdated, and the new building will help better serve both East Carter High School and West Carter High School. The building will house all of the district’s career and technical programs, including agriculture, construction, heavy equipment, engineering, health sciences and welding.
Fraley is also excited to serve students and teachers and said she loves recognizing their hard work. The district has staff recognitions every month where district staff recommend gold standard awards for their colleagues. Nominators send Fraley descriptions of how someone has gone above and beyond, and those people are recognized in staff newsletters and Facebook pages.
Students are also recognized with gold standard of kindness awards. Anytime someone in the district sees students going above and beyond to be kind, they’ll send Fraley a note about what the student did. Fraley hand-writes a card for the student with a gold dollar coin inside.
“That’s quickly become a tradition. The kids love to get the cards, and they love the gold coin; even our high school kids love that,” she said. “It’s a fun way for me just to get out and see kids and it’s important to me that they do well in school, that they do well academically, but more than anything, I want them to be good humans, and it gives me a chance to recognize them for that.”
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